The first Jake from State Farm commercial was a good ad because it was funny. A husband is confronted by his untrusting wife, who doesn’t believe he’d be on the phone talking to their insurance agent that late at night. “What are you wearing, Jake from State Farm?” she asks.
Jake replies, umm, khakis. Queue the decades-old tagline; “like a good neighbor, state farm is there.”
White Jake got replaced by black Jake, and while the new Jake is a good Jake, and I could care less what color he is, the deliberate virtue signaling annoys me. In House of Dragons, HBO cast black actors to play characters who are not just pale and blonde. The race itself has this distinctive trait and has for centuries. The black actors are fantastic. Top shelf. I love their characters and portrayal. I have no complaints about the performances, but HBOs need to pander (and it’s not the actor’s fault) is so obvious it is irksome, especially when we know it is not about pairing a performer to a role. They would never cast a straight white man as a character who was black and gay, no matter how well he pulled it off.
Annoying.
Perhaps not nearly as much as State Farm has annoyed policyholders in California. The good neighbor won’t be there for 72,000 of them whom they’ve decided to drop because the not-so-golden state has made doing business there impossible.
The insurer blamed inflation, regulatory costs, and the increasing risks from catastrophes for its decision to scale back in the blue state.
“This decision was not made lightly and only after careful analysis of State Farm General’s financial health, which continues to be impacted by inflation, catastrophe exposure, reinsurance costs, and the limitations of working within decades-old insurance regulations,” State Farm announced in a March 20 statement.
The reference to risks from catastrophes refers in part to forest and woodland policy. California has been a lousy steward, pandering to environmental groups that balk at the clearing of standing and downed wood to protect the forests and the people living in or near them. California also suffers from other tendencies that lead to risk, like letting Democrats run things. State Farm can’t see a way to be a good neighbor, so they’ve decided not to pretend.
This is a real crisis,” [California’s insurance commissioner Ricardo] Lara told KABC in an interview Friday.
The commissioner said he wants to investigate State Farm’s finances, but warned that regulators can’t go too far, or else they would risk pushing companies out of California entirely.
“Insurance companies are not like utility companies,” he told KABC. “By law, they don’t have to be here, and when we try to overregulate, we’ll see what happened after the Northridge earthquake, when the legislature came in and tried to overregulate, and they no longer write earthquake insurance in California.”
The obvious solution is to sue the crap out of them and maybe this isn’t like compelling speech (also illegal). You can’t force them to open a business or to do business, and this is California so, naturally, they have an Obamacare for property insurance.
- Customers should shop for another insurance policy by asking for recommendations from trusted sources or seeking an independent insurance agent.
- Utilize the California Department of Insurance shopping tools available on their website.
- Compare multiple policies, shop smart and choose the best coverage that suits your needs.
- Call the state’s insurance consumer hotline at 800-927-4357.
- Buy insurance through the California Fair Plan if you strike out in the normal marketplace.
One hitch. This insurer of last resort doesn’t have much of a fiscal surplus with which to cover claims when they have another significant wildfire event and the will.
Guess who will be on the financial hook when that happens?